The Atlantic

Trump's Russia Reset Will Survive Flynn's Ouster

But the uncertainty that Trump has brought to the United States is spilling into even the places that he hoped to do business with.
Source: Mikhail Klimentyev / Kremlin / Sputnik

As soon as news reached Moscow that Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had resigned after it became clear he had lied to the vice president about his conversations with the Russian ambassador, hawkish Russian lawmakers. Shadowy elements in Washington were trying to ruin not just Flynn, but the entire Russian-American relationship, they said. Leonid Slutsky, the head of the Duma’s foreign-affairs committee, put out a statement, by , saying Flynn’s ouster was a “kind of a negative signal for normalizing the Russian-American dialogue.” “Flynn was forced to leave after an aggressive campaign by U.S. mainstream media. ‘Daily News’ front page ‘Russian for the exit’ tells it all,” Alexey Pushkov, a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament, in English. In another, , he called the that “the next target is Trump himself.”

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